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Ask HN: Open source rules engine for categorizing applications by productivity?

2 pointsby reubanoalmost 8 years ago
As a user of RescueTime, I like how they automatically calculate your productivity by categorizing the applications you use, e.g., Facebook is classified as &#x27;social&#x27; and &#x27;unproductive&#x27;, while sublime text is classified as &#x27;development&#x27; and &#x27;productive&#x27;.<p>What I don&#x27;t like is that they have no way to associate time with individual projects, e.g., 2 hours &#x27;development&#x27; on projA and 3 hours &#x27;development&#x27; on projA.<p>After lots of research, I came across WakaTime [2] which claims to track projects, but only for their supported text editors and also ManicTime [3] which claims to track projects across all applications (Windows only).<p>Finally, I found Selfspy [4] which is free, open source, and tracks all applications. I figure it wouldn&#x27;t be too difficult to track projects by querying the db. E.g., I could set up a basic rules engine to match window titles --&gt; projects via keyword matching.<p>But in order to replicate the application categorization that RescueTime provides, I would have to implement an extensive rules engine for every popular application. Is there any publicly available data set with this information?<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rescuetime.com<p>[2] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wakatime.com<p>[3] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.manictime.com&#x2F;<p>[4] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gurgeh&#x2F;selfspy

1 comment

ivmalmost 8 years ago
If you are on Mac, try my app that is like RescueTime with project and invoicing support: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qotoqot.com&#x2F;qbserve&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qotoqot.com&#x2F;qbserve&#x2F;</a><p>If not - feel free to extract its built-in SQLite database with thousands of popular sites categorized (by hand!) and use it for personal purposes.